Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Near to the Buddha… The number one blessing is not associating with fools, and associating with wise people instead, because the people you associate with tend to determine the kind of person you’re going to become. Your behavior tends to follow theirs. There are many people in the world that you can associate with, so try to be choosy in deciding who you want to spend your …
- The Mind’s Ostinato… Is my consciousness now the same consciousness it’s going to be in my next lifetime? When beings enter nibbāna do they all become one, do they not become one? What happens?” Those questions are based on turning actions into things. **So try to get back to just seeing things as actions. What you are is a doing. Knowing is a doing. When you …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… That’s the flood of sensuality, the flood of views, the flood of becoming, and the flood of ignorance. In other words, as you practice the path, it’s very easy to get swept away by any of these things. So don’t think that when you sit here with your eyes closed, you’ll just float your way over to nibbana. The dangers …
- Explore & Experiment… It’s through exploring these things that the Dhamma becomes yours. We’re not here just to hear the Dhamma that the Buddha taught and then try to confirm that “Yes, that’s true.” Think about how the Buddha himself learned the Dhamma: It was through exploration: trying this, trying that. That’s how things become clear. So, think of the meditation as an …
- Brahmaviharas at the Breath… So try to bring these attitudes to your meditation, develop them in your meditation, so that you become more sensitive to which of the attitudes is appropriate at any one time, and to how you can actually generate that attitude when it’s needed. Then realize that these skills are not limited to how you relate to the breath. They relate to how you …
- Acceptance Isn’t the Issue… The mature attitude is that you do have this potential, and you’re glad that you’re aiming at developing it, becoming better and better. Then you can look back at what you’ve done already and you find that, yes, you have made progress. So the question is not acceptance. After all, look at Aṅgulimāla. The Buddha didn’t make it his business …
- How to Fall… As a result we don’t learn how to become good at things that don’t come easily. So when we make an effort at something that doesn’t come naturally, the easiest thing in the world seems to be to slip and fall and then just go with the fall and plop down, fallen. That’s called not knowing how to fall. The …
- Defilements… This is where the image of the committee of the mind comes together with the Buddha’s teachings on bhava, or becoming. You take on a becoming and it’s like a set of clothing you’ve worn in the past. It’s very easy to put it back on again. At some time in the past, you found that spite and malice and …
- You Can Do Better… craving for sensuality—your fascination with sensual thoughts, sensual fantasies; craving for becoming—wanting to take on an identity in a world of experience so that you can get something you want from within that world; and craving for non-becoming—the times when you’d prefer to be obliterated or that the world be obliterated. These things you want to abandon. When you …
- Dissolving Your Thoughts… That way, you maintain your focus still with the breath, and the thoughts become less and less and less of a disturbance. This ability comes about by learning how to view your thoughts with a really matter-of-fact attitude that there are times when thinking is useful, and there are times when you have crazy thoughts in your mind. But right now is …
- Truth Through Training… And as the breath has full range, the body has full range, the mind has full range, then they begin to become one. Now, on days when things settle down well, settle down easily, you don’t learn all that much. Those are the days we like. But the days where we actually learn are when the mind resists or the breath doesn’t …
- Focal Points… This is where playing with assumptions becomes not just a game, but something of value. You actually get beneficial results out of it. We’re not just playing little mental exercises for the fun of it. It can be fun, but it’s got a serious purpose: getting the mind to settle down and be steady. You try a variation. Stick with it for …
- Where the Brightness Is… The more you see these choices, and the more you make a practice of choosing the wise or the skillful course of action, speech, or thought, then the greater that sense of clarity becomes. The more clarity there is in the mind, the wider range of choices you realize you have. When the mind isn’t really clear, you can’t even think of …
- Samvega Transformed… The later additions to the Canon describe samvega as a rapturous feeling, probably because by that time it had become so closely associated with pasada. The Buddha had shown through his own practice and teachings that it was possible to find a true happiness that didn’t require fighting other people off, a happiness that was not going to end in death. All the …
- Strength of Body, Strength of Mind… If the body becomes a big issue, then you have to worry about its not getting enough food, not getting enough sleep. When you’re taking care of it, often you’re not willing to sacrifice it for the sake of the practice, for the sake of developing skillful qualities in the mind. So it’s good to get things into proper perspective: that …
- Asking the Right Questions… Try to become aware: What are you doing when the stress goes up? What are you doing when the stress goes down? That’s actually applying the four noble truths. In other words, there’s a rise in the stress: What are you doing? What’s the cause? When the stress happens to go away, what did you do? What’s the cause there …
- A Refuge from Modern Values… Then that becomes the norm, because “everybody’s doing it.” So you have to be very careful to choose your “everybody,” because a lot of activities that everybody is doing can cause a great deal of harm. The practice of meditation is not just mastering a technique. It’s also learning to pick up the right values. This is why the Buddha created the …
- Fabrication… It’s what they call “becoming” in the texts, when you create other worlds in the mind. Once you get into those other worlds, you lose touch with the process of creation. You lose touch with how becoming is brought together. So you’ve got to learn how to take those worlds of distraction — and the processes that form them — apart. The Buddha talks …
- Present-Moment Intelligence… The Buddha wants us to become sensitive to these things. So we begin by focusing on the breath, and learning to manipulate the breath. One of the main misunderstandings about breath meditation is that, whereas, in yoga they manipulate the breath, in the Buddhist way of doing things you don’t manipulate the breath. Where that idea came from, I have no idea, because …
- Goodness… Once you see that the qualities of the mind are important, you have the desire to prevent unskillful ones from arising and to let go of unskillful ones that have arisen; to give rise to skillful qualities and to develop the ones that have arisen so that they become fully developed. And you’ve got to keep this in mind. This is where mindfulness …
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